Quantum Physics and Encryption

There’s a now a growing concern for privacy. With several prominent personalities’ email accounts being hacked, the regular person is suddenly aware that this could also happen to anyone’s email or any other internet account.  But besides the hacking issues, which revolves around getting into someone else’s account with the correct username and password, another concern is that of mail being intercepted and read.

One of the earliest workaround to this is a PGP.  PGP ensures security through the use of keys, a private key and a public key.  It presumes that the file could be hijacked, that anyone can get a copy of the file or the email, but it would be useless as it is because it could not be read.  That’s because the encryption and decryption is dependent on the keys.  As noted, the limitation of this transmission security method is that it can be intercepted without the sender and recipient knowing it.

In fact, that’s the problem with all information being transmitted through the web, there is no way to know if anyone has read or intercepted the message as it zips across the globe hopping from one server to another.  Yes, that’s correct, all internet transmissions hop from one server to another, and as it does so, it leaves a copy on the server or the network appliance.  If not a copy, at least a trace of where it came from and where it’s going (this is specially true of routers, switches and hardware firewalls).

Recently, the first real-world demo of a quantum physics based network was presented to the world and this nicely circumvents the problem.  If there’s anyone who is listening in to the traffic, the sender and recipient will know.  Even better, the node where it occurred will automatically shut down, preventing further snooping, the traffic will continue as it gets re-routed along other nodes.

The layman’s explanation to this lies in two graphical examples.  The theory is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the thought experiment is called Schrodinger’s Cat.  Simply put, we have a cat in a sealed box and it has a 50-50 chance of dying within the hour.  There is no way to know if the cat is alive or dead unless we open the lid and take a look inside.

As a second and maybe clearer description, think of a stone thrown in the pond and making ripples or waves.  If there’s a disturbance, the waves would be disrupted.

In the case of data streaming through fiber-optic cables, if anyone wants to find out what the traffic is all about, he would have to listen in.  And the moment that anyone listens in, then the traffic is disrupted,  the network is alerted and the segment or node is shut down.

For the regular internet user, this might take some time to trickle down.  (IPv6 has been around more than 10 years, but only recently has it been of any widespread use.)  This is one developing technology which is sure to be implemented and put to use as soon as possible.  The good news is that us regular internet users won’t even notice it once it does get to use.